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priety of the first and the lowness of the second class, must be content with what we can spare of disapprobation from either they surprise us into pleasure by glimpses of character and form, and as often disappoint us by the obtrusion of heterogeneous or vulgar forms. But this disappointment is not so general, because we want that critical acquaintance with the principles of ancient art which can assign each trunk its head, each limb its counterpart: a want even now so frequent, notwithstanding the boasted refinements of Roman and German criticisms, that a Mercury, if he have left his caduceus, may exchange his limbs with a Meleager, and he with an Antinous; perhaps a Jupiter on Ida his torso with that of a Hercules anapauomenos, an Ariadne be turned into the head of a hornless Bacchus, and an Isis be substituted for every ideal female.

LECTURE VIII.— COLOUR. IN FRESCO PAINTING.

THE painter's art may be considered in a double light, either as exerting its power, over the senses to reach the intellect and heart, or merely as their handmaid, teaching its graces to. charm their organs for their amusement only. In the first light, the senses, like the rest of its materials, are only a vehicle; in the second, they are the principal object and the ultimate aim of its endeavours.

I shall not inquire here whether the arts, as mere ministers of sensual pleasure, still deserve the name of liberal, or are competent exclusively to fill up the time of an intellectual being. Nature, and the masters of art, who pronounce the verdicts of nature in poetry and painting, have decided that they neither can attain their highest degree of accomplishment, nor can be considered as useful assistants to the happiness of society, unless they subordinate the vehicle, whatever it be, to the real object, and make sense the minister of mind.

When this is their object, design, in its most extensive, as in its strictest sense, is their basis; when they stoop to be

* In repose or reposing. — W.

the mere playthings, or debase themselves to be the debauchers of the senses, they make colour their insidious foundation. The greatest master of colour in our time, the man who might have been the rival of the first colourists in every age, Reynolds, in his public instruction uniformly persisted to treat colour as a subordinate principle. Though fully aware that without possessing at least a competent share of its numberless fascinating qualities, no man, let his style of design or powers of invention be what they may, can either hope for professional success, or can even properly be called a painter, and giving it as his opinion, on the authority of tradition, the excellence of the remaining monuments in sculpture, and the discovered, though inferior relics of ancient painting, that, if the coloured masterpieces of antiquity had descended to us in tolerable preservation, we might expect to see works designed in the style of the Laocoon, painted in that of Titian. He still persisted in the doctrine that even the colour of Titian, far from adding to the sublimity of the great style, would only have served to retard, if not to degrade, its impression. He knew the usurping, the ambitious principle inseparable from colour, and therefore thought it his duty, by making it the basis of ornamental styles, not to check its legitimate rights, but to guard against its indiscriminate demands.

It is not for me (who have courted and still continue to court colour as a despairing lover courts a disdainful mistress) to presume, by adding my opinion, to degrade the great one delivered; but the attachments of fancy ought not to regulate the motives of a teacher, or direct his plan of art. It becomes me, therefore, to tell you, that if the principle which animates the art, gives rights and privilege to colour not its own; if, from a medium, it raises it to a representative of all; if what is claimed in vain by form and mind, it fondly grants to colour; if it divert the public eye from higher beauties to be absorbed by its lures-then the art is degraded to a mere vehicle of sensual pleasure, an implement of luxury, a beautiful but trifling bauble, or a splendid fault.

To colour, when its bland purity tinges the face of innocence and sprouting life, or its magic charm traces in imperceptible transitions the forms of beauty; when its warm and ensanguined vigour stamps the vivid principle that animates.

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full-grown youth and the powerful frame of manhood, or in paler gradations marks animal decline; when its varieties give truth with character to individual imitation, or its more comprehensive tone pervades the scenes of sublimity and expression, and dictates the medium in which they ought to move, to strike our eye in harmony-to colour, the florid attendant of form, the minister of the passions, the herald of energy and character, what eye, not tinged by disease or deserted by nature, refuses homage?

But of colour, when equally it overwhelms the forms of infancy, the milky germ of life, and the defined lines of manhood and of beauty with lumpy pulp; when, from the dresser of the Graces, it becomes the handmaid of deformity, and with their spoils decks her limbs, shakes hands with meanness, or haunts the recesses of loathsomeness and horror*; when it exchanges flesh for roses, and vigour for vulgarity; absorbs character and truth in hues of flattery, or changes the tone demanded by sublimity and pathos into a mannered medium of playful tints of colour, the slave of fashion and usurper of propriety, if still its charms retain our eye, what mind, unseduced by prejudice or habit, can forbear to lament the abuse?

The principles of colour, as varied, are as immutable as those of nature. The gradations of the system that connects light with shade are immense, but the variety of its imitation is regulated by the result of their union, simplicity-clear-) ness if obtained by harmony.

Simplicity represents of every individual its unity, its whole. Light, and its organ, the eye, show us the whole of a being before its parts, and then diffuse themselves in visual rays over the limbs. Light with its own velocity fixes a point, the focus of its power; but as no central light can be conceived without radiation, nor a central form without extension, their union produces that immutable law of harmony which we call breadth.

One point is the brightest in the eye as on the object: this is the point of light. From it, in all directions, the existent parts advance or recede, by, before, behind each other; the

• S. Bartolomeo dello Spagnuoletto. S. Agatha Martirizzata nelle poppe di Seb. del Piombo. Il Porco Sventrato di Ostade. Il Macello dei Carracci. La Caccia Pidocchi di Murillo

two extremes of light and shade make a whole, which the local or essential colour defines-its coalition with the demitint, the shade and reflexes, rounds-and the correspondence of each colour with all, tunes.

The principles that regulate the choice of colours are, in themselves, as invariable as the light from which they spring, and as the shade that absorbs them. Their economy is neither arbitrary nor fantastic. Of this every one may convince himself who can contemplate a prism. Whatever the colours be, they follow each other in regular order; they emerge from, they flow into each other. No confusion can break or thwart their gradations from blue to yellow, from yellow to red; the flame of every light, without a prisma, establishes this immutable scale.

From this theory you will not expect that I should enter into chemic disquisitions on the materials, or into technic ones on the methods of painting. When you are told that simplicity and keeping are the basis of purity and harmony, that one colour has a greater power than a combination of two, that a mixture of three impairs that power still more, you are in possession of the great elemental principles necessary for the economy of your palette. Method, handling, and the modes of execution are taught by trial, comparison, and persevering practice, but chiefly by the nature of the object you pursue. The lessons of repetition, disappointment, and blunder impress more forcibly than the lessons of all masters. Not that I mean to depreciate or to level the comparative value or inferiority of materials, or that instruction which may shorten your road to the essential parts of study; but he is as far from nature who sees her only through the medium of his master, as he from colour who fancies it lies in costly, scarce, or fine materials; in curious preparations or mouldy secrets; in light, in dark, in smooth, in rough, or in absorbent grounds: it may be in all, but is in none of these. The masters of ancient colour had for their basis only four, and this simplicity made Reynolds conclude that they must have been as great in colour as in form.* He * This is an error founded on a misconception of Pliny's. Pliny more than once contradicts his own assertion. The Greek painters even of an early period had a great variety of colours: their resources in this respect were quite as abundant as those of the painters of modern times. See the Editor's article COLORES in the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, London, 1842.-W.

who cannot make use of the worst, must disgrace the best materials; and he whose palette is set or regulated by another's eye, renounces his own, and must become a mannerist. There is no compendious method of becoming great; the price of excellence is labour, and time that of immortality.

Colour, like design, has two essential parts, imitation and style. It begins in glare, is caught by deception, emerges to imitation, is finished by style, and debauched by manner.

Glare is always the first feature of a savage or an infant taste. The timid or barbarous beginner, afraid of impairing the splendour by diminishing the mass, exults in the Egyptian glare which he spreads over a surface unbroken by tint, and not relieved by shade. Such are in general the flaming remnants of feudal decoration. This is the stage of missal painting; what Dante called "alluminar," the art of Cimabue.* Its taste continued, though in degrees less shocking, to the time of Michelangelo and Raphael. Gods, and mothers of gods, apostles and martyrs, attracted devotion in proportion to the more or less gaudy colours in which they were arrayed. It was for this reason that Julius II. wished Michelangelo had added to the majesty of the patriarchs and sibyls by gold and lapis lazuli.

Deception follows glare; attempts to substitute, by form or colour, the image for the thing, always mark the puerility of taste, though sometimes its decrepitude. The microscopic precision of Denner, and even the fastidious, though broader detail of Gherard Dow, were symptoms of its dotage. The contest of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, if not a frolic, was an effort of puerile dexterity. But deception, though at its ultimate pitch never more than the successful mimicry of absent objects, and for itself below the aim of art, is the mother of imitation. We must penetrate the substances of things, acquaint ourselves with their peculiar hue and texture, and

*This is an allusion to the xith canto of the Purgatorio:

Non se' tu Oderisi

L'onor d'Agobbio e l'onor di quell' arte

Ch' alluminare è chiamata in Parisi.

Indicating Oderigi of Gubbio, a celebrated miniatore of manuscripts in the thirteenth century. See on this subject the article PALEOGRAPHY in the Suppl. to the Penny Cyclop., by the Editor of these Lectures.

W.